But before going into my topic of the day, I wondered why that huge  (#6 on all-time list ) earthquake did not produce a gigantic tsunami ( from the  Star-Advertiser ): The most recent event had an estimated magnitude of 8.7 or 8.8 on the scale scientists use to measure the strength of earthquakes.     By contrast, catastrophic tsunamis in the past, including a wave that struck Indonesia in 2004 and another that hit Japan in 2011, were generated by a quake of about magnitude 9.   That might sound comparable to Wednesday’s quake, Melgar said, but it is significantly bigger. That’s because the earthquake scale is logarithmic: A magnitude- 9 event possesses about 10 times as much energy as a magnitude-8.7 event, and about three times as much energy as a magnitude-8.8 event.   Also, current models suggest that Wednesday’s earthquake occurred across a stretch of seafloor that was hundreds of miles long. The longer the quake, the more energetic the...

  First, on Trump and War. Ukraine-Russia War has not been solved in one day. Israel-Hamas War is getting worse and worse.  Trump's attempt to convert the Gaza Strip into an American resort was taken by the Middle East to be a big joke. He has initiated a global trade war . The bear market woke up today . Dow Jones:  - 1630  3.9% drop S&P 500:  -274  4.84% drop Nasdaq composite:  -1050  -6.97% Countermeasures and retaliation will of course occur. Ordinary households will be most affected, for they will be hurt by higher prices on everything, with a higher unemployment rate. Stagflation, inflation and recession are looming. Read this article released today in The Economist,  President Trump's mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc. Shingles can be terrible, and could be hurting you for up to a month.  I was tempted to show a few photos, but will save you the horror. Early Symptoms:   Burning, tingling, or shooting pain in a s...

Harvard researchers published in the  British Medical Journal  a study of which occupations lowered the rate of Alzheimer's deaths. They looked at American Alzheimer's death records of more than 400 occupations, including when they died. The two occupations with the lowest rate of Alzheimer's death were taxi and ambulance drivers. More specifically, these two jobs had death rates 56% lower than the general population at any given age. An earlier British study provided some clues. Since 1865, London taxi drivers had too pass what's known as "the Knowledge," a grueling test of a person's memory of thousands of streets, landmarks and routes within the city. They had to study for years to become qualified. In 2000, London neuroscientists compared MRI brain scans of cabbies and other occupations, and  found that the former had changes in the hippocampus, the brain region dedicated to memory and navigation.   The longer cabbies worked, the larger their hippocamp...